You'd think Carlos Frenk would be pleased that no one calls him a crackpot any more. He wasn't always so lucky. "I would stand up at conferences and have people almost throwing rotten tomatoes at me," he says.His offence was to be an ardent advocate of a then controversial idea - that most of the universe's matter comes as a cold, heavy soup of invisible "dark matter". Today that is the orthodoxy. Wherever dark stuff accumulates, so the standard story goes, normal matter meekly follows, irresistibly drawn in by its overbearing gravity. This matter forms stars, and then galaxies are born - meagre pricks of light in a domineering dark empire.
展开▼
